Exhibit of the week: Kandinsky

Guggenheim Museum

New York

Through Jan. 13, 2010

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When most people think of the Guggenheim Museum, they think of Frank Lloyd Wright, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. They should also think of Wassily Kandinsky. In many ways, “Kandinsky is the angel in the architecture at the Guggenheim.” Solomon R. Guggenheim bought scores of the painter’s pioneering abstract paintings for what was originally called the “Museum of Non-Objective Painting,” and “the circling ramp of Wright’s rotunda was surely designed with that Russian’s swirling, unanchored abstractions in mind.” The first major retrospective dedicated to the artist in almost 25 years, “this marvelous show” fills Wright’s museum with nearly 100 colorful, complex Kandinsky canvases.

“Not for the first time, but with extra verve, the spiral ramp acts as a time machine,” taking us on a tour of Kandinsky’s career, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. “The adventure begins with images of landscapes and horsemen,” still recognizable in paintings he created during the early 1900s. But only a few years later, he became one of the first artists to push into total abstraction. By 1911, in transitional works such as Impression III (Concert), we can almost watch as barely recognizable real-world objects “disintegrate into impulsive brushwork and clangorous color.” Kandinsky’s artistic development was largely driven by his own arcane theories, which led him to believe that visual art should work like music. “His most extraordinary painting,” Overcast (1917), could be a tone poem by his friend Arnold Schoenberg. Though haunted by darkness, “it develops visceral forms in an uncharacteristically sensual” way.

Kandinsky’s “rigorous nonrepresentational approach” was the result of a lifelong quest for what he called “the spiritual in art,” said Karen Wilkin in The Wall Street Journal. Partly inspired by the once-popular system of beliefs known as Theosophy, his private symbolism often can’t be puzzled out without reference to his many writings. But even if you don’t know a thing about their inspiration, the paintings are breathtaking on their own, each obeying an intricate visual logic. “Even in his pared-down, geometric late paintings,” the choices Kandinsky made regarding color, line, and contour were meant to be “distillations of emotion.” This introspective approach may have been his greatest legacy, imitated by the many New York–based abstract expressionists who learned their art studying the Kandinskys at the Guggenheim.